Reading List: non-fiction

We all live in our own bubble, somehow. As far as I know, there’s nobody among my acquaintances who sympathises with the AfD (Alternative for Germany). At least nobody shows it openly. That may be because an acquaintance or friendship with me and voting for the AfD are incompatible, the people around me know that, and

I admit it: I am a Grundgesetz ultra – a die-hard fan of the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution. Unreservedly. No, I don’t constantly insist on my fundamental rights, and I don’t shout at every police officer that he or she isn’t allowed to do this or that. But I do believe that the Basic Law, as the foundation of our l

The newest book of Robert Habeck. Former Vice Chancellor of Germany. Member of the Green Party. Well, for a long time I was an SPD voter. Although I certainly had a certain affinity for green issues, I still didn’t vote for the Greens. That changed, however, with the 2021 federal election. As a voter, I had increasingl

No, this book was certainly not light Sunday-evening-tea-on-the-sofa fare. I recently picked it up as part of a stack of the Reclam books I mentioned before. These are often 200 pages at most, so they are read fairly quickly. Snack-sized, but in this case definitely not fast food. This book is about triage. In other wo

Konrad Zuse is one of the many giants on whose shoulders my industry stands. I still remember being a know-it-all teenager and pointing out to my English teacher, Mrs. W. (yes, the ex-wife of my German teacher, Mr. W.), that the computer wasn’t actually invented in the US, as our textbook claimed, but by a German. This

Some days, you start to lose faith in humanity. On days like that, I’d recommend this book. It tells the story of how a small Canadian town opened its doors to the people stranded there when all flights were grounded.

Strictly speaking, I should hardly have any memories of Helmut Schmidt as chancellor – and I don’t really have any significant memories of my own, apart from snippets of the Tagesschau, Germany’s main evening news. Even back then I was allowed to watch it regularly. Then again, I don’t know whether even those are just

When you sit in a doctor’s waiting room with a book, you almost feel like a snob already, while everyone around you stares into their phone, completely entangled in the net. If on top of that you’re reading a small Reclam book, it looks even a little “snobbier”. And if the title then happens to be “Über die Dummheit” (

I don’t think many people really understand how LLMs work. Why they manage to come across as if they “know” things, even though they’re “just” a model of language, not of knowledge (though this book also raises the question of whether the two can really be separated at all). Why being wrong is baked into how they work.

Reclam publishes a small but, in my opinion, very fine series of little books. The series is called “Was bedeutet das alles?” (“What does it all mean?”). The books are roughly the size of the Reclam booklets I knew from school. Only they aren’t yellow, but colourful. “What does it all mean?” is indeed a question I ask

I recently wrote in a text about a book on the Basic Law, Germany’s constitution , that I am a Basic Law ultra. Despite the weaknesses of our state, I allow myself to be very glad to live in Germany. In some respects, the relationship status “It’s complicated” would admittedly be appropriate, but I like this country no

Whenever I hear about Neil deGrasse Tyson, I immediately think of Carl Sagan. And yet the two differ greatly, at least in public. Both are – or were – great science communicators. But each of them is also a product of his time. I always saw Carl Sagan as the calm, quiet scholar with an uncanny gift for explaining thing

The news caught me at a bad moment last week. On 24 October I had to let Henry go, and I was pretty off the rails all week. I still am. Then, on 28 October, Patrick Stewart died. Yet another piece of bad news in a time already full of bad news. Of course I didn’t know the actor personally. And of course the loss of Hen

If astrophysics weren’t – as the name suggests – part of physics, and therefore full of formulas with letters and strange symbols, this science would have a clear advantage over the study of history. While in history you have to piece the truth together from many subjective and few objective data points, astrophysics –

There are images of events that have burned themselves indelibly into my memory: the falling towers on September 11, the crumpled ICE train at Eschede. And that image of the “major malfunction” on January 28, 1986: the Space Shuttle “Challenger”, having just exploded. The cloud at the end of the flight, out of which th

“Failure Is Not an Option” is a book by Gene Kranz. Most people will know the name from his role as Flight Director on Apollo 13, but his career extends far beyond that – both before and after. And it includes situations that are no less significant just because it’s harder to make a film about them. The Apollo 1 disas

Recently, while working on another text about a book by Carl Sagan, I was looking for a video on YouTube. I really liked one of the comments there: “Every disaster begins with a scientist who was ignored.” It is, after all, a recurring trope in films: a scientist is ignored by a politician, and the politician later die

Neil deGrasse Tyson called it “The Book of Carl”: “Pale Blue Dot” (in German: “Blauer Punkt im All”). The name refers to the small blue dot in one of the most famous images taken by Voyager 1. It was taken from a distance of “billions and billions” of kilometres (six billion, to be exact) and shows our Earth. Not even

As a fourth-grader, staying up late isn’t exactly easy. I had to promise not to be grumpy the next morning, however tired I was. I kept that promise, and so I was actually allowed to stay up, for weeks on end. What for? In 1983, Cosmos was on TV, and I got to watch every episode – together with my parents. It’s one of

My paternal grandparents had a guest room. It was a somewhat strange room. It was lower than all the other – in themselves rather high-ceilinged – rooms in the house. Three steps led up into it. Inside there was a bed, a sofa. And many, many books. Much of it wasn’t my thing: Johannes Mario Simmel (yes, really Simmel,